August 10, 2013

The Rose (1979) - DVD

by Walter ChawLenny
by way of John Waters, Mark Rydell's The Rose is a
film made obsolete by years of "Behind the Music"--this story of a
Janis Joplin-inspired singer boozin' her way into a theatrical grave
counts a lack of vitality and anything resembling surprise as chief
among its faults. Bette Midler's performance scored an Oscar nomination
in 1980, but it lands with a shrillness now that defeats its attempts
at pathos and depth. Why we should care about a self-destructive blues
siren with impulse control issues is one of those things unwisely taken
for granted while by now, twenty-three years after the fact, the
lessons of hedonism and the downward spirals of the performing kind are
curiously tepid, delivered as they are with a bullhorn and a bad Otis
the Town Drunk impersonation.

Rose (Midler) is a
boozy honky-tonker from Florida whose whole life is that terrible Yes
song about bands on the road. Her manager, Rudge (Alan Bates), mistakes
Rose's fatigue for the usual bratty unreliability, placing himself
among the legion of folks who take and take from Rose, and just never
give anything back, the poor dear. That line of people ends at the feet
of noble cowpoke chauffer Huston (Frederic Forrest), who seems to have
Rose's best interests at heart--though God only knows why. Fights in
diners, screaming matches at stadiums, and drive-by peepings of her
all-American parents (who, inexplicably, are hanging an American flag
on a clothesline to dry), all lead Rose to her big homecoming concert.

A few concert
performances recorded live before an actual audience bristle with the
sort of vitality that does the impossible by giving me an inkling of
why it is that Midler has a fan following. Unfortunately, The
Rose's concert scenes are sealed off from the rest of the
film, the sense of the capricious and the delirious in Midler's stage
persona lacking in her attempts at drama. Accordingly, the best moment
of the film is more concert than drama, coming in a gay nightclub where
drag queens do a mean impersonation of Rose to Rose's delight. It is a
sequence shot with a rough vigour and a genuine ebullience that
provides for the only moment in the piece where Rose's inevitable
self-immolation seems more tragic than pathetic, as well as a glimpse
into the potential of the material for fullness rather than caricature.

THE DVDTaken from
seriously degraded source material, the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen
DVD presentation of The Rose is compromised by
drab-looking colours (something that could be attributed to DP Vilmos
Zsigmond, but I don't think so), bad grain, and, particularly in the
last reel, a series of print imperfections (lines through the picture,
a giant blue mark across the top third) that are distracting and
disheartening. The film looks years older than films that are actually
years older, with the concert footage suffering the most. The Dolby
Surround soundtrack demonstrates moments of good fidelity and channel
saturation mostly, and most curiously, outside of the concert
sequences, where they would make the most sense. Generally speaking,
the audio is just serviceable.

Director Rydell
contributes a self-aggrandizing and delusional commentary track that
gamely narrates the action for long stretches before falling into even
longer stretches of reverent silence. Riddled with inaccuracies and
stupid statements, Rydell claims The Rose is
Midler's first film (it's not: she made her screen debut as much as
thirteen years prior), congratulates himself for how daring the picture
is for 1979 (yeah, right--I'd be stunned if anyone batted much of an
eye upon its initial release after all of the societal and cinematic of
upheavals of the '60s and '70s), and says that Midler's performance is
a high-water mark in the history of motion pictures.

Being a big fan of
his underestimated John Wayne picture The Cowboys,
it came as something of a major disappointment to hear Rydell here
beating his own drum, laughing at his own jokes and marvelling at his
skill in guiding Midler through her bad performance. Just because the
majority of people who would actually listen to a commentary track for The
Rose are already fans doesn't mean they're necessarily
idiots. Trailers for The Rose and fellow Fox titles
All That Jazz, South
Pacific, The Sound of Music, For
the Boys, and "The Marilyn Monroe Diamond Collection"--which
opens with a clip from Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes that, by itself, has more charisma and genius than
any portion of The Rose--round out the disc. Originally published: August 11, 2003.